The Melheimian Sabbatiblog

Nothing More

A Poem Composed in an Ice Storm on Highway 169 at Midnight Last Night
(after I arrived at my cabin to find no electricity and drove out again to find a warm bed at the Patterson home in Mankato)

NOTHING MORE

there is nothing more
fabulous
frightening
free
than the second
you sense
what no others
can see

there is nothing more
marvelous
magic
and fun
than the moment
a million minds
merge
into one

there is nothing more
terrible
freeing
and true
than the instant
you know
exactly
exactly
exactly
what you
must do

nothing more

He Qi's Swedish Leggo Art

If your kids want to have a fun Bible art project, take a look at this:

http://legojesus.blogspot.com/

For the last five years I've served as "free agent" for my friend, Dr. He Qi. I've helped set up shows at Yale, Oxford, Harvard, the Billy Graham Museum, Concordia and Luther Seminaries, the NYC museum of Biblical art, etc, 30 foot quilts made in Africa, speaking engagements on the same bill as (relatively unknown) Barak Obama and Bill Moyers, and dragged him to the mountains of Colorado (serving as cook) while he sketched.

Last month we were contacted by Per Wilder, a Priest at the Church of Sweden, Västerås, to ask if they could have permission to create his art in Leggos!

You'll be able to follow the creation of the art in video online. But better than that, why don't you connect with Per and get his advice on making your OWN Leggo He Qi project? Let me know which piece of art you'd like to build, and I'll get you the permission. It could be a really fun VBS event.

Rich

(PS - Haven't heard yet about the Butter He Qi Jesus at the MN State Fair, but am still waiting)

Good Art Site for Kids

Question: What website is getting kids to submit art at a pace of 9400 submissions a day?

www.artsonia.com

Nice idea.

I think every parent should have an empty frame on the wall and ask their kids to slip in a new "gallery piece" complete with title every week. Then photo or scan the entries, and put the scans in one of the digital photo frames so the best of every year is continually before the kid's eyes.

The Fifth Church

Aside from locking my car keys in the car at the gas station in downtown Minneapolis yesterday and "tapping" another fender in the parking lot today, I'm starting the year off by finally solidifying a piece on a new ecclesiology that I've been mulling over and over for ten years. I call it "The Fifth Church." I'm presenting the first of a number of white papers on this on Thursday, and will put snippets of it online here over the next few months. It starts with the premise that the heart is a church. Here an excerpt of chapter 1. See what you think:

The Heart as a Church

The First Church that must be fed in the post-modern world is the individual heart. Committees don’t have vision. People do. Committees don’t die. Committees were never alive. People die — physically, emotional, spiritually — when they are not fed. The heart of the church is the church of the heart.

The first job of the Fifth Church is to feed the peoples’ hearts. You can anesthetize most of the human brain and the heart keeps on pumping. Anesthetize the heart, however, and the brain quickly dies.

Whatever we do as the Fifth Church, we’ve got to become heart specialists. Our pulpits had better speakto the heart. Our classrooms had better nurture and strengthen the heart. Our entire system of delivering the Good News must shift from efforts of the head to efforts of the heart. The head is a modern emphasis. The heart is a pre-modern and postmodern thing. We don’t live in a modern world.

Nothing happens in any “church” until it happens fi rst in a single heart. The heart is the First Church. If the Fifth church cares to share a single byte in the iPhones of the future, it had better reengineer all of its efforts to become an intensive care unit for broken and bruised hearts. The church that doesn’t head to the heart might as well head to the realtor.